‘Maybe all men are a drug.’
— Candace Bushnell, Sex and the City
Creation exists because there is a witness. According to the Hindu school of thought, creation is the coming together of Purusha (the Self and pure consciousness) and Prakriti (the female creative energy, nature) where neither can exist independently. The existence of creation is validated by the Self.
Beauty, in nature, does not need a witness to acknowledge and enjoy it. It simply is. A beautiful flower, a rainbow, a waterfall invite awe from the witness, but their beauty is indifferent to it. However, beauty in art, music, and literature created by the artist needs a patron to recognise it.
On the other hand, a woman’s beauty thrives on the adulation of the beholder; it titillates her sense of vanity. Even the apsaras could not resist it. In the Indian mythology, Ganga, an apsara in the Indraloka, was punished for enjoying Mahabhisha’s shameless attention and was instructed by Indra to leave.
Beauty is a source of power for women, and they enjoy this power thoroughly. Women get a rush when they see the effect it has on everyone around them. Beauty impacts people in more than a visual way, and, ironically, beautiful people are assumed to be good-natured, too. They gain acceptance more easily than average-looking people.
A woman’s beauty has the power to hold men captive. It challenges their intelligence and strength of character. Good-looking men, too, have power over women, but since women are not entirely visually driven, it is easy to override this power. In case of an attractive man, as the person behind the beauty surfaces, their beauty recedes. Eventually, for a sustainable relationship, women are driven by a man’s personality and his ability to provide material and emotional nourishment to her.
But for majority of the men, beauty is a dazzling experience. Being highly visual creatures, they resort to ogling at beautiful women unabashedly, making beauty and porn such a huge industry. According to researchers Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki, the regions of brain associated with visual stimuli and penile erection shows higher activity when exposed to an attractive woman. According to the research, when these areas are lit up, the areas linked to making moral judgement also diminish.31
For most men, physical beauty is enough to captivate them for a long-term relationship. Men judge women on how attractive they look, it is their first criteria. Beauty, which falls under aesthetics, is like all other values—subjective in nature. Women usually harbour the delusion that ‘they are the fairest of them all’!
These fair beauties need a witness to validate their truth or delusion. Since beauty is abstract in nature, these fair creatures find their witnesses along the way. This rush of finding validation makes them delusional throughout their lives, even when their beauty has receded.
Men may get a high just by looking at a beautiful face, but women need a man to have certain qualities to feel that rush. If a man is more successful compared to his counterparts, women get a higher rush. The level of accomplishments and respect of a woman’s admirer in the society decides the worth of her beauty. If the admirer belongs to the lower social strata, a woman is likely to feel offended, rather than flattered, by the attention.
As for men and their equation with beauty, they feel obliged to appreciate beauty wherever they spot it, irrespective of age, class, or social status. They give the beauty its due in the form of the brazen male gaze. Women use innocuous and subtle messages to make men pick up these cues and pursue them.
When a man invests in a woman, a so-called debt ledger account comes into force which men expect would be paid off through sex. Authors Allan and Barbara Pease say, ‘A man does things for a woman for the reward of sex and other benefits, and women know this.’32
But when men assume it to be the norm with women and sexualise all their interactions with them, the women are forced to deal with this misogyny.
In the Indian mythological tale of Nala and Damayanti, when Nala loses his kingdom in a gambling match, Damayanti, his wife, refuses to abandon him in his hour of misfortune; she accompanies him to the forest. Since Nala does not want her to go through the hardships awaiting him, he leaves her while she is asleep so that she can return to the safety of her parents’ house. Once awake, Damayanti realises that Nala has left without her and she is on her own. While she is still in the forest, a hunter saves her from a venomous serpent. But when she expresses gratitude for saving her life, the hunter tells her that he is not interested in her gratefulness, he just wants to have the pleasure of her body.
Likewise, in the novel Madame Bovary, when Emma approaches the merchant to bail her out of her insurmountable debts, he asks her to sleep with him. Completely flabbergasted by his indecent proposition, she exclaims, ‘You are taking a shameless disadvantage of my distress, sir! I am to be pitied—not to be sold.’33
On the other hand, some women exploit their beauty to gain favours from men. Not all women do it knowingly, but when a woman is in a relationship with a man, she expects him to bail her out when she is in desperate need of help. In the popular television series M*A*S*H when Major Houlihan needs $240 for her sister’s wedding, she asks her lover Major Frank Burns for it. She tells him, ‘Surely, I’m worth that much!’
Madame Bovary, too, was willing to offer herself to her ex-lover Rudolphe to pay off her debt, not in the least conscious of her prostitution. This exchange is known as ‘unconscious prostitution’. While the prospect of obliging the merchant seemed deplorable to her, she was willing to rekindle her lost love for the sake of money.
Beauty is a source of joy, but it is fleeting in nature. While some women build their lives solely around it, some choose to go beyond external beauty to something that lasts longer and is more valuable—their intellect.